Description

The underground Macedonian Revolutionary Organization recruited and mobilized over 20,000 supporters to take up arms against the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1903. Challenging conventional wisdom about the role of ethnic and national identity in Balkan history, Keith Brown focuses on social and cultural mechanisms of loyalty to describe the circuits of trust and terror—webs of secret communications and bonds of solidarity—that linked migrant workers, remote villagers, and their leaders in common cause. Loyalties were covertly created and maintained through acts of oath-taking, record-keeping, arms-trading, and in the use and management of deadly violence.

Author Bio

Keith Brown is Professor at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. He is author of The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation and editor of Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the former Yugoslavia.

Reviews

"This book is, to my mind, exactly the kind of work that needs to be done in order to understand civil wars, insurgencies, nationalism, and rebellions, and to get away from what the author rightfully critiques as ‘pidgin social science.'" —Chip Gagnon, Ithaca College

"Keith Brown does a fantastic job of reconstructing the feeling inside Macedonia itself at a time when Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria were vying with Turkey to possess it. He makes clear how important it is not to impose the present on the past. By thinking outside the box of nationalism, Brown improves our understanding of the past and also contributes to understanding the present." —Victor Friedman, University of Chicago

"Drawing on over two decades of engagement in anthropology, archival and social history, and fieldwork in the Balkan region, Keith Brown has crafted a subtle and compelling account of revolutionary insurgency in turn-of-the-century Macedonia. His analytical focus on loyalties, rather than identities, goes beyond critiques of nationalism in enabling powerful new understandings of the region’s histories and its continuing social dynamics. Elucidating 'the circuits travelled by things, people and ideas,' Loyal Unto Death reveals how, against a backdrop of Ottoman governance, competing nationalisms, rural poverty, and labour migration to North America, a modern revolutionary organisation transformed existing solidarities into a new sense of Macedonian selfhood and built commitment to an agenda of political autonomy." —Jane K. Cowan, University of Sussex

"Loyal unto Death is an innovative work that should inspire debate." —Slavic Review

"Loyal Unto Death is a fascinating account of an anti-imperialist struggle that pushes readers to think beyond the nation. It will serve as a powerful resource for both students and scholars embarking on historical ethnography . . . Likewise, the book will be extremely valuable for those working on revolutionary movements in search of strategies to draw out the lived experiences of underground movements." —POLAR

"[Keith Brown] takes as his central problem the question of how at the start of the twentieth century the Secret Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (MRO) was able to grow so rapidly from a tiny band of conspirators to an organization capable of fielding some 20,000 participants in the Ilinden uprising of 1903." —American Historical Review

Customer Reviews

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Archival Imagination at Work 1. Terminal Loyalties and Unruly Archives: On Thinking Past the Nation2. The Horizons of the “Peasant”: Circuits of Labor and Insurgency3. The Oath and the Curse: Subversions of Christianity4. The Archive and the Account Book: Inscriptions of Terror5. The četa and the jatak: Inversions of Tradition, Conversions of Capital6. Guns for Sale: Feud, Trade, and Solidarity in the Arming of MRO Conclusion: The Archival Imagination and the Teleo-logic of NationAppendix 1. Documents of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization Appendix 2. Biographies from the Ilinden Dossier